Change Your Brain Every Day - Becoming the DJ in Your Own Life – Part 1 of an Interview with Barry Goldstein

Episode Date: May 16, 2017

Music can tell stories, increase brain power, and even influence our mood. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are joined by Grammy Award winning producer Barry Goldstein to talk about all things music. Goldstein, also the author of the bestselling book “The Secret Language Of The Heart”, provides scientific research to illustrate how what we hear can affect how we feel.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We are so excited for the next three podcasts to actually have one of our dear friends, Barry Goldstein, whose musical experience spans many styles and genres from co-producing the Grammy award-winning track 69 freedom special with Les Paul for best rock

musical best rock instrumental in 2005 to providing ambient music for Shirley MacLaine. Barry has composed and produced for television, film, major record labels, and top 10 recording artists. In addition, Barry reached Billboard Top 10 Albums on New Age charts with the New York Times bestselling authors, Neil Donald Walsh, Anita Morjani, and yours truly, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Colette Barron-Reed. Barry's just done so many things. His bestselling book, The Secret Language of the Heart, provides the latest scientific research on the benefits of sound, music, and vibration. His music is used in hospitals hospices cancer centers and medical practices and the reason we wanted to have him on besides we love him and he's our friend and um music is such a hot topic when it comes to the brain it's one of the things that has been shown to actually

grow the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped structure in your brain that's responsible for memory. It can decrease stress hormones. It can improve your mood. There's so many cognitive and neuroscience benefits to it. Welcome. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here with both of you. Thank you for being with us. So how did this all start for you? How did you fall in love with music and why healing? Yeah, well, it took quite a couple of turns to get to this point. But at a young age, I discovered the power of music sitting behind a piano with my mom and just her playing and me realizing the resonance that happened in a room when you hit a piano so I think I fell in love with it at an early age and as I as I progressed to becoming a music

producer in New York City I realized that I was beginning to lose my love of music by creating 100 hours of studio time to create a five-minute song and how stressed I was becoming actually within that. in a much different way of composing and just allowing the music to come through me as opposed to spending that meticulous time in production and composition. And I started to target back to my own heart rate at a relaxed state. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I did some research on the internet. And at 60 beats per minute, most of us between 60 and 70 beats maintain a relaxed state. So I said, well, I really want to reconnect with my heart. And so I began to take these hour-long journeys, I call them of decomposing, really. Interesting. Yeah, I thought no one will listen to this, but maybe it will help

me with my stresses. And people encouraged me. They said, you need to put this music out there because it's very, very calming. They were hour-long pieces, not a lot of melody. And now we're learning and research that this exact type of music is how we're targeting people with insomnia. So at 60 beats per minute, very long tones, not a lot of melody, really kind of induces us to relaxation. So I think I was doing it then,

and then I became very curious as we began to gather testimonials from people of how they were using it in dentist offices and for sleep and with their mom who had dementia. I got so curious about it that I wanted to know why this was happening. Yeah, so I'm one of those people. I use that music to go to sleep. I meditate to it.

I actually did a long dental procedure with no anesthesia because I just didn't want the anesthesia, but using meditation and music. So I never really understood how it affects your brain, but clearly it does. Music is very powerful. Well, we love it so much that Barry's music is the brain-enhancing music we have on BrainFit Life.

Right. And it's similar to our Billboard charting album, The Brain Warrior's Way. I love saying that. Because there's music for sleep. There's music for relaxation. There's music for focus, creativity, motivation. So how is that all different? I mean, you target the beat of the heart, but when you want to help someone feel happier or more focused, how do you change the music for that? Yeah, well, it does target the beat of the heart. And the heart brain relationship is really interesting. Because when you're targeting your heart, you're really targeting your brain as well, and vice versa. You know, so if I'm slowing down,

and I'm in that relaxed state, and my heart is, my heart is coming down, my heart rate is coming down to a relaxed state, I'm not going to be able to be in beta, you know, my heart rate is coming down to a relaxed state. I'm not going to be able to be in beta with that. I'm going to move to a slower brain wave state as well. Interesting. So there's this conversation that happens between the heart and brain that's targeting this, but really a lot of it as well as dynamics within music. So when we're trying to relax in the evening you want very little melody but if you have an important business meeting and you want to be motivated and inspired you know

you're going to listen to something with rhythm right that is going to you're going to want to feel that in your body right and so you're working with dynamics as well and we've showed this in research with attention you know when there's dynamics in music for example if you go to a classical concert and all of a sudden there's a pause in the music your attention is completely grabbed by that silence because all of a sudden the dynamic has changed so by creating yeah by creating these dynamics you can target different different moods and enhance different moods so without knowing any of the science I mean I think most of us

Are intuitively know That music changes our moods It changes our states And it can do it very quickly That's right Like I just said for sleep I will often meditate To that type of music you talked about

Those long sort of drawn out You know I don't know What you would call it technically But slower type of music Yes My favorite I'm a rock girl so you know put some Def Leppard on and I'll get motivated and I want to work out and it's like my that's my happy Place right makes me happy instantly

Put 70s music on and I feel instantly anxious and angry Right it's weird I cannot Listen to Cat Stevens at home I grew up loving Cat Stevens and as soon as I do, because it reminds her of her drug addict uncle, the trauma when she was four years old. Right. And I think that's really where we're going with music. Now that we're starting to

see more and more research on it, we're getting more specific because it's not just a panacea where we can prescribe music like we do medicine. You know, each person is so individual that we have to look- It can be therapeutic, but it can be traumatizing based on your experience. That's right. And I think that's where we're starting to fine tune the research and starting to say, wow, we really have to get more specific with this because music is very powerful. We just can't subcategorize and say, okay, classical is great for this. Heavy metal is not good for this.

Because within each one of those, there's so many differences. And I think that we might be oversimplifying a bit when we're looking at genre-specific music. Because, for example, in classical music, you can listen to the William Tell Overture or you can listen to a Brahms lullaby. Right. And so when we say classical, what part of classical is it? What part of reggae is it when we're talking about that? What's the tempo of it? Right.

Who played it? Yeah, even rap. Rap has happy rap and then it's got some pretty dark stuff. That's right. That's right. So it's when we begin to realize the power of music that we can then incorporate it to a program where we're targeting our own mood states. We're targeting physical challenges, you know, insomnia, or we're targeting even becoming more emotionally intelligent with autistic children.

Amazing. You know, and we can talk more about that. But there's some amazing studies of how music engages the brain and the emotional aspects of that to create emotional intelligence and autism that's amazing and it's not just playing music it can be listening that's the music so there's this concept called entrainment which means your brain picks up the rhythm that's right and the beat in the environment. And so talk about that a little bit and how people are using your music in different kinds of settings. Okay. Well, music is a language, so it speaks to us. And just like a language, it creates a rhythm.

Like you ever hear people say, I'm falling out of rhythm in my life. So music has a metronome that it basically utilizes. You know, one, two, three, four, two, two, three, four. Your heart in our body is also a metronome. And study has shown at 66 beats per minute, they just had people listening to a metronome. And it actually reduced anxiety just by listening to that metronome. So when we begin to apply that into music as well, targeting different states, if we want to be relaxed at 60 beats per minute, let's listen to a piece like we discussed, you know, where it's really long

tones, not a lot of melody that's going to distract you, but your heart has the ability to adapt. And that's why when people are working out, they're not going to listen to relaxation music. There's been a study that, I think it was done by Pandora, that showed people listening to yoga, one of the most important things for them is the music that is played. Yeah. And the yoga session, right? So one of the reasons I have trouble with yoga is the music is too slow for me. Right. But there are some classes that, you know, are like very kind of DJ oriented.

Yeah. Right. And they're taking you on more of a journey, right? Because there's several stages of yoga. Yeah. It will have slow music. It will have music to move to because your heart's adapting. You're beginning to breathe to it.

And your breath is beginning to be the conductor as well. So I consider the heart like the orchestra leader that's going on in your physical body. And when you're breathing, that's the conductor saying, no, let's slow down here. Let's speed up here. And then your heart starts to send out those messages. We call this coherence interesting so when your heart is beating at these smooth orderly rhythms right it's just like the conductor wow you can hear the harmonies you can hear the beautiful sections of the

orchestra that's one of the reasons it has the power to help us calm down and slow not only our heart but but even change our brain state, and there's actually something called heart rate variability, which is the beat-to-beat variability of your heart that is associated with anxiety, depression, memory issues, the more variability. So it's a myth that when I take your pulse or your nurse, when you take a pulse it should be even because if there's too little variability that's a sign of illness and stress uh and after you have a heart attack if you don't have the variability you have more than double the risk of dying in the next two years and certain

kinds of music actually increase heart rate variability which is heart health which then goes to brain health so they are connected they're very connected and the heart has its own nervous system that's connected to the big brain. So for people listening, there's not really inherently anything right or wrong with listening. Because you don't like slow music, it's not a bad thing. And you like a faster beat. It's just your preference. Yeah. I mean, there are some great starting points with it that we can plug in, just like there's some general things in medicine or general things in nourishment that we know that work really well, like what we're talking about. But ultimately, it's targeting the states that you want to be in. And I call it becoming the DJ of your own life.

You know, just like a DJ. I love that. So, but let's, give us a prescription on, because, you know, here at the Brain Warriors Way podcast, we talk about, you know, so here are brain healthy habits. Here are things to do and here are things not to do, we talk about, so here are brain healthy habits. Here are things to do and here are things not to do, right? They're general prescriptions. And then they're prescriptions for, well, I struggle with ADD. I have anxiety. I have depression and so on.

Next podcast, we're actually going to go into some of those conditions and talk about different strokes for different folks. But for now, as we finish this one up, talk about what are some general guidelines on how to use music to boost your heart health, but also your brain health. Okay, so can I use you as an example? All the time. Okay, so tell me about your day-to did your day start off some things that are going on in your day and let me work with you to create a little music program for the day awesome so I woke up early thinking I'm working on the magic of memory a new course with a friend of mine who's a memory savant. And so as soon as I

woke up, I went through the 40 things I memorized last night, just as an exercise to see if I could remember. So I did that. So let me, I'll pause you there, right? So with that, I mean, you're talking about gathering a lot of information, right? And waking up with excited, right? And you want to basically integrate some of that information, you know, and just allow it to kind of like stew and brew, right? So for me, I would, first of all, I like to start off my day with a piece of music that connects me to gratitude, okay? That makes sense.

Yeah. And just really connecting with my breath, my heartbeat. I call this the internal symphony, the sounds within me. So I would start off with a piece of music that creates gratitude for me. And sometimes that's a very calming piece of music, or it could be like Sly and the Family Stone. Thank you for letting me be myself. So we're not getting genre specific, we're gearing towards what emotion do I want to target and what piece of music is going to make me feel that way. So that would be my jumpstart for you with that and beginning in gratitude. And then I would ask myself, what's my intention for the day? So where do you want to go next?

What would you like to achieve in your day? Well, I love what you said because as soon as my feet hit the floor in the morning um i have a mantra for myself today is going to be a great day um because then my brain finds why it's going to be a great day so if there's a piece of music that's attached to gratitude and positive emotion that's awesome yeah and mantra too i mean that's another great thing to talk about but what repetitive mantra does it takes you out of your thinking mind right and also in it increases cerebral blood flow so that mantra when you're doing it over and over again you're going to increase that blood flow to get those ideas going to get your day started.

You know I adore you. He's the end to my yang. He's amazing. He grounds me. But he's the poster child for being grounded and not getting shaken up all that much. That's not me. So let's just talk about people who are a bit more like, I wake wake up in the morning, had that, that total same, um, yeah, I wake up with the gratitude. I want to focus and get myself. And I do that. And I did that. And then instantly my day just

gets hectic. Okay. It got really hectic, really fast. And then I got off the tracks and got really annoyed at something really quickly. Now I, I have a little exercise I do to like, let it go. Okay. Because I knew I needed to come in and record and do to like, let it go. Okay, because I knew I needed to come in and record and it's like, let this go. Okay, so get back to gratitude. But let's talk about, yeah, let's disrupt your state. Okay, and let's, let's put it on my phone. Okay. So let's talk about two things. So grounding, right? So if you want to reground in your morning, you feel like you're going off base for you. Think about the ground, right? So if you want to reground in your morning, you feel like you're going off base. For you, think about the ground, right? Right.

What kind of music do you think is going to ground you in? Oh, geez. What do I like or what do I think will ground me? No, what do you think will ground you? I don't know. I like bass. I don't know. Exactly.

Oh, is that right? That's exactly right. Oh, I'm so happy. It's exactly right. That's what I like. That's what I'm drawn to. So ground, think of that. You want to go, what does the ground do? It goes lower. Right. Oh, is that right? That's exactly right. Oh, I'm so happy. It's exactly right. That's what I'm drawn to. So ground, think of that. You want to go, what does the ground do? It goes lower. Right. I love bass. So you want to connect to

bass. Which is why I love rock. Right. Or even, you know, some of the more modern dance music and hip hop has a lot of bass in it. So that's going to ground you. See, it's not because I have ADD. It's because I need to be grounded. So you're going to feel yourself more in your body because you can feel the bass. I do. That's so true. So that's going to feel yourself more in your body because you can feel the bass.

I do. That's so true. So that's going to be great for you. It's all about that bass. Oh my God, I'm so excited. Like that makes sense because I just like, I literally, I'll turn the bass up in my car

because I'm like, I just feel that. You just like. Yeah, so those are the lower frequencies, right? Bass are lower frequencies. They're slower moving. They're lower, lower and slower. If it was the other way around and you want to be in a more creative state, you want to go higher because they're lighter energies.

But grounding back in is going to be all about the bass. I'm always drawn to that. So when we come back, we are going to talk more about how to use music as part of your day and how different people like Tan and I can use music in a more targeted way. Stay with us. We're here with Barry Goldstein on the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast.

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